Pure Reason Revolution - The Dark Third

Share.

Pure Reason Revolution has found somewhere safe.

By Ed Thompson

Pure Reason Revolution REALLY wants to be Pink Floyd with a Generation Y post-grunge twist. Ostentatious prog rock with strangely bizarre song titles and 11-minute running times mark the band's most recent release. Unfortunately, they too often come off more like the Moody Blues or Electric Light Orchestra (or even Fleetwood Mac) to accurately pull off a true Floyd comparison. Sounding like any of the other bands mentioned can hardly be considered a bad thing, but when the ultimate goal is summiting Mount Everest, ascending the top of Mount Hood is hardly considered a worthy substitute.

Things starts off with a an obvious tribute/rip-off/homage from Dark Side of the Moon entitled "Aeropause." The 5-minute instrumental intro sounds as if it was pulled directly from the first 10 minutes of the classic Floyd album in bits and pieces and then re-assembled with slight variations.

The next track, "Goshen's Remains" has an intro that hints strongly toward an influence from the musical tablature of The Wall. But then the song - and the rest of the album - takes an interesting turn. When singers Chloe Alper and Jon Courtney start singing, they blend their vocals with the harder edge guitar and synthesized computer sounds and end up with a result that can be, at times, very impressive. At their best, the pair harkens back to Christine McVie/Lindsey Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac.

The most ambitious song on the album is a track called "Arrival/The Intention Craft" which has a much more modern rock edge to it and is highlighted by guitar licks pulled from Bush's Sixteen Stone and added to the by now all-too-familiar harmonized vocals of Courtney and Alper.

The band's central theme of Pink Floyd for the 21st century could not be complete without the 12-minute opus "Bright Ambassadors of Morning". Even the song title was culled from a lyric in the Floyd track "Echoes" off the Meddle album.

Pure Reason Revolution shows its influences in its music and makes no attempts to hide their love of Floyd. The biggest difference is that the members of Pink Floyd took rock and roll and stretched it to new and untested bounds. The seminal psychedelic band of the '60s, '70s and '80s did things no one had done before and few have come close to matching since. With The Dark Third Pure Reason Revolution have merely copied some of those ideas and neatly played them into a safe, by-the-rules record that neither stretches bounds nor goes somewhere no other band has been.